I took a minute, now that I felt a bit more comfortable, to look around the room. It was large, with three big windows on one side that looked out onto the common green, some new-looking computers in the back of the room, and instead of desks, a series of tables, arranged in three rows. The class itself was small—twelve or fourteen people, tops. To my left, there was a girl with long, strawberry-blonde hair, twisted into one of those effortlessly perfect knots, a pencil sticking through it. She was pretty, in that cheer-leader /student-council president/future nuclear physicist kind of way, and sitting with her posture ramrod straight, a Jump Java cup centered on the table in front of her. To my right, there was a huge backpack—about fourteen key chains hanging off of it—that was blocking my view of whoever was on the other side.
Ms. Conyers hopped off her desk and walked around it, pulling out a drawer. With her jeans, simple oxford shirt, and red clogs, she looked about twelve, which I figured had to make it difficult to keep control in her classroom. Then again, this didn’t seem like an especially challenging group. Even the row of guys at the back table—pumped-up jock types, slumped over or leaning back in their chairs—looked more sleepy than rowdy.
“So today,” she said, shutting the desk drawer, “you’re going to begin your own oral history project. Although it isn’t exactly a history, as much as a compilation.”
She started walking down the aisle between the tables, and I saw now she had a small plastic bowl in her hand, which she offered to a heavyset girl with a ponytail. The girl reached in, pulling out a slip of paper, and Ms. Conyers told her to read what was on it out loud. The girl squinted at it. “Advice,” she said.
“Advice,” Ms. Conyers repeated, moving on to the next person, a guy in glasses, holding out the bowl to him. “What is advice?”
No one said anything for a moment, during which time she kept distributing slips of paper, one person at a time. Finally the blonde to my left said, “Wisdom. Given by others.”
“Good, Heather,” Ms. Conyers said to her, holding the bowl out to a skinny girl in a turtleneck. “What’s another definition? ”
Silence. More people had their slips now, and a slight murmur became audible as they began to discuss them. Finally a guy in the back said in a flat voice, “The last thing you want to get from some people.”
“Nice,” Ms. Conyers said. By now, she’d gotten to me, and smiled as I reached into the bowl, grabbing the first slip I touched. I pulled it back, not opening it as she moved past the huge backpack to whoever was on the other side. “What else? ”
“Sometimes,” the girl who’d picked the word said, “you go looking for it when you can’t make a decision on your own.”
“Exactly,” Ms. Conyers said, moving down the row of boys in the back. As she passed one—a guy with shaggy hair who was slumped over his books, his eyes closed—she nudged him, and he jerked to attention, looking around until she pointed at the bowl and he reached in for a slip. “So for instance, if I was going to give Jake here some advice, it would be what?”
“Get a haircut,” someone said, and everyone laughed.
“Or,” Ms. Conyers said, “get a good night’s sleep, because napping in class is not cool.”
“Sorry,” Jake mumbled, and his buddy, sitting beside him in a Butter Biscuit baseball hat, punched him in the arm.
“The point,” Ms. Conyers continued, “is that no word has one specific definition. Maybe in the dictionary, but not in real life. So the purpose of this exercise will be to take your word and figure out what it means. Not just to you but to the people around you: your friends, your family, coworkers, teammates. In the end, by compiling their responses, you’ll have your own understanding of the term, in all its myriad meanings.”
Everyone was talking now, so I looked down at my slip, slowly unfolding it. FAMILY, it said, in simple block print. Great, I thought. The last thing I have, or care about. This must be—
“Some kind of joke,” I heard someone say. I glanced over, just as the backpack suddenly slid to one side. “What’d you get? ”
I blinked, surprised to see the girl with the braids from the parking lot who’d been running and talking on her cell phone. Up close, I could see she had deep green eyes, and her nose was pierced, a single diamond stud. She pushed the backpack onto the floor, where it landed with a loud thunk, then turned her attention back to me. "Hello? ” she said. “Do you speak?”
“Family,” I told her, then pushed the slip toward her, as if she might need visual confirmation. She glanced at it and sighed. “What about you?”
“Money,” she said, her voice flat. She rolled her eyes. “Of course the one person in this whole place who doesn’t have it has to write about it. It would just be too easy for everyone else.”
She said this loudly enough that Ms. Conyers, who was making her way back to her desk, looked over. “What’s the matter, Olivia? Don’t like your term?”
“Oh, I like the term,” the girl said. “Just not the assignment. ”
Ms. Conyers smiled, hardly bothered, and moved on, while Olivia crumpled up her slip, stuffing it in her pocket. “You want to trade?” I asked her.
She looked over at my FAMILY again. “Nah,” she said, sounding tired. “That I know too much about.”
Lucky you, I thought as Ms. Conyers reassumed her position on her desk, a slim book in her hands. “Moving on,” she said, “to our reading selection for today. Who wants to start us off on last night’s reading of David Copperfield?”